Approximately 3.2 billion pairs of eyeglasses were sold last year at a retail cost of 135 billion dollars. To put this into context, for every smartphone sold, more than two pairs of eyeglasses are sold. As such, eyeglasses are already the highest volume wearable in the market today. While clearly an instrumental product, eyeglasses fundamentally have not changed for over the past 100 years. Moreover, eyeglasses and other valuable objects have a drawback. They are easily misplaced. In fact, 55 million eyeglasses, collectively valued at 18 billion dollars and resulting in 90,000 tons of waste, were lost last year.
One solution for this shortcoming is to incorporate a Bluetooth distancing mechanism into objects such as eyeglasses. Such approaches are based upon Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI) measurements. Such approaches make use of the relationship between the received signal strength and the distance. Theoretically, there exists an inverse proportional relationship between the received signal and the distance between a receiver that is trying to locate an object and the object transmitting a Bluetooth signal that can be represented linearly. In such an approach, the Bluetooth distancing mechanism reports a distance between a master device (e.g., a smart phone) and a slave device (another Bluetooth device such as eyeglasses). However, conventional Bluetooth distancing does not report very reliable distances. Various phenomena like multipath fading and shadowing make it impossible to establish a precise relationship. Bluetooth jumps between the multiple Bluetooth channels (e.g., 37 different channels) and, when there are multiple Bluetooth enabled devices in the same room that are all using the Bluetooth channels at the same time, different channels perform differently even though they are in the same environment. It is not known which channel is going to perform well in the current physical environment. As such, the distance that is reported using conventional Bluetooth distancing between a master and slave device is inaccurate and, in fact, even in instances where the master and slave device are just standing still, the reported distance using conventional Bluetooth distancing tends to jump around. Thus, conventional Bluetooth distancing does not adequately address the shortcoming in the art.
Given the above background, what is needed in the art are systems and methods for tracking the location of an object, such as a pair of eyeglasses.